This article expands on a co-authored project with Timothy Laurie on the practices and ethics of higher degree research (HDR) supervision (or advising): "What does good HDR supervision look like?" in contemporary universities. It connects that project with scholarship on the relevance of "common sense" to questions of knowledge, value, action, and critique. This work is drawn together here in relation to supervision training: "How do we learn to supervise?" and "How are we inculcated into common sense about supervision practices?" Although the co-authored supervision project aims to contribute to discussions about what might constitute good training for HDR supervision, this article is primarily interested in the how questions: How do we learn about good and bad, or effective and ineffective, supervision practices, including their diversity, and about the institutional and disciplinary expectations that define them as such? These questions are pursued below in relation to a number of discursive means that are central to how we learn to supervise: cliché, gossip, and anecdote. These are forms of speech through which knowledge about supervision practices circulates in academic contexts. In addition to this, participating in such speech genres--coming to understand their conventions, assumed logics, and appropriate contexts of enunciation--constitutes supervision training in important ways. That is, in different ways, cliché, gossip, and anecdote both teach us about supervision and form social relations and approaches to knowledge integral to effective supervision. This acknowledgement addresses both who is presumed to be the subjects of formal supervision training (what, and how, do they already know?), and the wider contexts and processes of learning about supervision into which formal programs intervene.